<?php
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$xhtml = array(
	'<{title}>' => 'Clean-up',
	'takedown' => '2017-11-01',
	'<{body}>' => <<<END
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2019/02/14.jpg" alt="A street at night" class="framed-centred-image" width="649" height="480"/>
<section id="drudgery">
	<h2>Drudgery</h2>
	<p>
		My discussion posts for the day:
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			Humans evolved through a combination of trial and error (survival of the fittest) and incremental randomness (mutation).
			Those that were &quot;good enough&quot; lived to pass on their genes to the next generation, while those that were too terrible at survival did not.
			As a result, our thoughts are rather complex, but not necessarily always logical.
			Often times, even some of our more-useful thought processes only make it to our conscious mind in the form of instinct and feelings.
			None of this baggage and and utter garbage represents how modern computing works.
		</p>
		<p>
			When programming, you can&apos;t <strong>*reason*</strong> with the computer.
			You can&apos;t convince it to do what you want by telling it how much you&apos;d like it to help you out.
			No.
			You have to give the computer very specific instructions, and those instructions will be followed to the letter.
			In other words, computers run using pure logic.
			(Mathematics being included in this, as mathematics is a form of logic.)
			Only humans that are able to think in a particularly logical way, either by nature or through practice, are able to successfully program a computer.
		</p>
		<p>
			So yes, I think students of computer science require an aptitude for mathematics and other logic.
			That aptitude can either be natural or acquired; you don&apos;t necessarily need to be born with it, but you do need to have it to get anywhere in computing.
			What other skills and attributes do I think are needed?
			Intelligence would be the main one.
			An aptitude for logic can be learned, but your level of intelligence will form a natural barrier that you&apos;ll have trouble getting past.
			Your level of intelligence will determine just how much potential you have in the field.
			An ability to plan ahead and visualise the branches of your programs is pretty vital as well.
			You don&apos;t need to necessarily keep all branches in your head at once, but you won&apos;t get anywhere if you can&apos;t consider what you need the computer to do before you try to make it do it.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<h3>What technology do I want to see?</h3>
		<p>
			Something that allows immortality would be nice.
		</p>
		<p>
			On a more-realistic note, $a[DNS] for telephones would be awesome.
			The telephone number system is stupid, yet everyone assumes everyone else has telephone service and many major companies insist you use your telephone number as an identifying handle to track you across everywhere.
			It drives me bonkers.
			If I could use my domain name instead, I&apos;d get a telephone line (I don&apos;t have telephone service) and use my domain name instead of the number.
		</p>
		<p>
			The telephone number system is actually set up in a very asinine way right now.
			It use to be that telephone numbers were like $a[IP] addresses for the telephone network.
			They didn&apos;t mean anything to humans, but they meant something to the machines.
			Imagine memorising the $a[IP] addresses of the websites you intend to visit, and entering those in the address bar of your Web browser instead of domain names.
			That&apos;s what the old telephone network was like.
			When you switch $a[ISP]s though, you necessarily lose your $a[IP] address and end up with a new one.
			Again, this is exactly what it was like on the old telephone network.
			People were attached to their telephone numbers though and didn&apos;t want to give them up.
			Instead of fixing the problem by setting up telephone $a[DNS] then, the system was overhauled to make numbers &quot;portable&quot;.
			To do this, the numbers were made to mean nothing.
			They&apos;re now just all entries in a lookup table, just like $a[DNS].
			Except unlike $a[DNS], this lookup table isn&apos;t distributed.
			And you can&apos;t have more than one name pointing to the same address (as in telephone line, not as in postal address).
			And the names mean nothing to the people.
			So now, telephone numbers are not only not meaningful to humans, but <strong>*also*</strong> not meaningful to the machines.
			No one wins from this.
			It&apos;s just idiotic.
		</p>
		<p>
			So yeah, telephone $a[DNS] would make me very happy.
		</p>
		<h3>What car technology do I enjoy?</h3>
		<p>
			None.
			I don&apos;t drive a car; instead, I prefer to ride my bicycle everywhere.
			I get fresh air that way and I get exercise.
			I&apos;m actually kind of fat, and need the exercise.
		</p>
		<p>
			I do sometimes think about what great technology bicycles are though.
		</p>
		<h3>What person has inspired me the most?</h3>
		<p>
			I really, <strong>*really*</strong> hate to say it, but I think Richard Stallman has inspired me the most.
			Honestly, I don&apos;t like the guy, and I think his way of thinking is rather arbitrary and a bit backwards.
			However, he was the catalyst that set me down the line of thinking I have now.
		</p>
		<p>
			I used to be a simple OS X user.
			I saw the $a[GNU] $a[GPL] around sometimes, such as in the Seashore image editor I used to use.
			(Seashore is basically a hobbled version of the $a[GIMP] (bad pun intended) made to run well on OS X.
			The $a[GIMP] is more-powerful, but at least at the time, it didn&apos;t play very well with OS X.)
			The license gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling, but I didn&apos;t think too much about it at the time.
			I later switched to Linux due to licensing issues.
			It would have been illegal to run OS X on my non-Apple laptop I&apos;d been given, but Windows and I have <strong>*never*</strong> gotten along.
			I had to find some non-Windows system that&apos;d be legal to run, so I tried out Linux.
			It functioned without all the freezing and crashing I always had to deal with on Windows and the developers weren&apos;t using legalese to forbid me from running it on whatever hardware I happened to have.
			That&apos;s all I needed.
			I didn&apos;t need any specific software from any specific company, as long as the basics such as a Web browser, a text editor, and an image editor were available.
		</p>
		<p>
			Eventually, I ran into the crowd that refers to the system as &quot;$a[GNU]/Linux&quot; instead of just &quot;Linux&quot;.
			It drew my attention enough to look into what $a[GNU] is, and through $a[GNU], I found the $a[FSF].
			The $a[FSF], for those that don&apos;t know, is the organisation led by the aforementioned Richard Stallman.
			Their philosophy is just his philosophy, mirrored.
			I&apos;m not saying there&apos;s anything wrong with that; the purpose of the $a[FSF] is simply to spread Stallman&apos;s philosophy.
			I fell in love with that philosophy, and for a couple years, I even had a paid membership.
		</p>
		<p>
			It dawned on me after the first year though that their philosophy is rather inconsistent and short-sighted.
			They were all worried about proprietary software, because you don&apos;t have control over your own machine.
			However, they&apos;re all for proprietary <strong>*media*</strong>, and most of their publications are in fact proprietary.
			Proprietary media is just as bad though, if not worse.
			When you experience media, it becomes etched into your brain.
			It becomes a part of you.
			Yet if it&apos;s proprietary, you&apos;re not allowed to derive from it.
			In other words, you&apos;re censored.
			Proprietary media is censorship.
			With proprietary software, you lose control of your possessions, but with proprietary media, you lose control over your creativity and you lose control over your mind.
			This isn&apos;t any better.
			So I left the $a[FSF].
			These days, I call the system &quot;Linux&quot; like the masses do, but now, I do it deliberately.
			I do it to make the statement that I don&apos;t follow the $a[FSF] or their recommendations.
		</p>
		<p>
			Free software and free culture are a huge part of who I am.
			And Stallman led me to both.
			He intended to lead me toward free software and away from free culture, but I wouldn&apos;t&apos;ve found either one without his influence.
			So while I hate to admit someone that opposes free culture would have that much impact on me, I think he&apos;s probably the single person that has influence me most.
			He&apos;s inspired me with his good views, but also with his toxic views.
			I don&apos;t believe that ideas are property.
			They can&apos;t be stolen, for example.
			If you steal something, the original owner no longer has it.
			But if you copy an idea, the original thinker doesn&apos;t lose that idea.
			And that belief of mine, which forms one of the core components of my own philosophy, was inspired in me by Stallman.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<h3>Popularity</h3>
		<p>
			According to that one website we were told to visit two weeks ago, $a[PHP] still has 78.9% market share, when it comes to server-side languages (W3Techs, 2019).
			That makes it by far the most-popular server-side programming language on the Web.
		</p>
		<h3>Usage</h3>
		<p>
			The discussion assignment asks us to find which Web applications and online systems use $a[PHP].
			At 78.9% market share, building such a list sounds like an exercise in futility.
			However, we can list a few of such applications and systems.
		</p>
		<p>
			To start with, we&apos;ve got this school&apos;s classroom.
			Look up at your address bar.
			The path component (the part after the host name but before the first question mark (if any) or pound sign (if any)) of this page&apos;s $a[URI] is <code>/mod/forum/discuss.php</code>.
			The <code>.php</code> at the end doesn&apos;t necessarily mean the page is a $a[PHP] script, as the server could be configured bizarrely, but it&apos;s a very good indication.
			Most Web servers are configured in a somewhat-sane manner.
			So we can deduce that this page is probably served by a $a[PHP] script.
			If you take a look around, most of the other pages on this site also appear to be $a[PHP] files.
			Other $a[PHP] applications I&apos;ve seen in the past include WordPress, phpBB, phpMyAdmin, WikiMedia, and $a[GNU] Social.
		</p>
		<h3>Advanced features</h3>
		<p>
			We&apos;re asked to discuss the &quot;advanced features&quot; of $a[PHP].
			I&apos;m not sure that phrase really means anything though.
			What features are &quot;advanced&quot; and which ones aren&apos;t is more a matter of opinion, than anything.
			I&apos;d compare the language in question to my native tongue in most cases, but $a[PHP] <strong>*is*</strong> my native tongue.
			It&apos;s the language I learned to program with and it&apos;s the language I use for nearly everything even today.
			Even all my command line scripts are written in $a[PHP].
			(Once I learn Perl, I might switch to that; I hear Perl might be similar to $a[PHP], but without $a[PHP]&apos;s numerous consistency issues.)
		</p>
		<p>
			There are a number of features in $a[PHP] I&apos;d prefer not to have to live without though.
			If Perl is missing any of these, I probably won&apos;t switch:
		</p>
		<ul>
			<li>
				Namespaces
			</li>
			<li>
				Classes, functions, and constants that do not share their namespace with variables and cannot be simply redefined
			</li>
			<li>
				Parameter type hinting (strong typing would be preferred, but isn&apos;t available in $a[PHP])
			</li>
			<li>
				Return type declarations
			</li>
		</ul>
		<p>
			I suppose one unusual feature $a[PHP] has, which might be considered &quot;advanced&quot;, is the fact that is starts in a sort of raw output mode, where everything in the file is output literally until raw output mode is ended with the <code>&lt;?php</code> tag.
			Personally, I find this feature to be a drawback to the language though, and would prefer to start off in command-interpretation mode.
			I suppose traits and interfaces could be interpreted as advanced features too.
		</p>
		<div class="APA_references">
			<h3>References:</h3>
			<p>
				W3Techs. (2019, February). Usage Statistics and Market Share of Server-side Programming Languages for Websites, February 2019. Retrieved from <a href="https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/programming_language/all"><code>https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/programming_language/all</code></a>
			</p>
		</div>
	</blockquote>
</section>
<section id="religion">
	<h2>Religion</h2>
	<p>
		This book has been referring to Yahweh as just &quot;God&quot;, or the lord, or the Lord of Hosts.
		I think there&apos;s been a couple other titles mentioned, but never actually a name dropped.
		I&apos;ve been using the name Yahweh in the summaries of my thoughts on the reading material just because I know this is a branch of Christianity and one of the names of this god is Yahweh.
		I do prefer to use the actual names of things, after all, when they&apos;re important enough to single out.
		There is but one god in this religion, so that god usually is singled out by even mentioning him with any sort of context at all.
		So I&apos;ve been calling him Yahweh.
		Here in 2 Nephi 22:2 though, we get the Mormon name for Yahweh though: Jehovah.
		Yahweh and Jehovah, as I understand it, are the two closest translations of the original Hebrew name of this god available in English.
		As I understand it, neither of these translations is really any more or less correct than the other.
		So I guess from this point forward, when referring to the Mormon variant of this god, I&apos;ll use the name Jehovah.
		I haven&apos;t seen this version of the name used really except by the Witnesses until now, which is why I tend to default to the other name.
	</p>
	<p>
		Also of note, it seems another name for Jesus is Jesse.
	</p>
	<p>
		I think I need to start over with the Book of Mormon and do a more-thorough write-up of my thoughts as I go along.
		Like, I should have a separate page on the subject, instead of leaving all these scraps in my journal, and I should quote the passages I mention.
		Having this page should help me organise my thoughts both to better figure out what to think and to better explain what I think about this religion&apos;s teachings.
		Supposedly, this book is super ancient, way outside of copyright status at this point, but even the original &qupt;translation&quot; into English is old enough to be in the public domain at this point as long as I don&apos;t quote any of the helpful comments added in more-modern copies of the book.
		From the looks of it, chapter and verse numbers weren&apos;t added until 1981, but I don&apos;t think chapter and verse numbers can really be copyrighted, and even if they can, I believe simply referencing them to help people reading my thoughts on them would fall under fair use.
		I just need to make sure that my quotations come from the public domain version from 1830.
		(For reference, at the time of writing this, all written works published before 1924 are in the public domain in the United States, where I live and where this website is based.)
	</p>
</section>
<section id="formatting">
	<h2>Page formatting</h2>
	<p>
		I used to be pretty terrible about how I formatted my webpages.
		Entire paragraphs resided on single lines, and there were no spaces or indentions between elements in a table, for example.
		It was atrocious.
		At some point, I fixed my work going forward, but my past work was still a mess.
		Later, someone sent me a pull request on one of my pages that had malformed code.
		I couldn&apos;t even display the difference properly to check the pull request for validity because the lines were so long that they exceeded NotABug&apos;s display limits.
		I forget how I ended up checking the pull request, but it was a major pain.
		Soon, I launched a clean-up plan to fix my entire journal, along with most of the rest of my site.
		All pages outside my coursework directory were fixed, one by one.
		Cleaning up my entire journal was a pain, but the journal was also the place errors were most likely to be found, so it was the place that most needed the clean-up.
		I never did go back and clean up my coursework&apos;s markup though.
	</p>
	<p>
		Until tonight.
		At tonight&apos;s $a[EUGLUG] meeting, my project was to clean up the my past coursework.
		Finally, my website&apos;s been fully cleaned up.
		I think.
		Mostly, anyway.
		It&apos;s likely there are a few places where the markup could have better indention or the wrong tags are in use, but all the problems tended to have on every page have now been fixed.
		For whatever reason, I found some incomplete $a[URI]s in the references on a couple pages, so I had to do some experimenting to find the missing data and add it.
		Luckily, those pages hadn&apos;t been removed from the Internet, so I was able to re-find those pages.
	</p>
</section>
END
);
